The widespread use of the phrase “a victory of democracy”, when referring to the Constitutional Court Nkandla ruling, is a disservice to South Africa. Words have the power to shine light on a meaning. Words have the power to marginalise. The choice of the word democracy in this instance is not a trivial matter because…

If tomorrow belongs to the youth, yesterday must be ultimate egalitarianism. Yesterday belongs to everyone. While the future is vague, diaphanous, ethereal, the past is unambiguous, immutable and solid. We can all change the future. None can change the past. If, like me, you feel a little like a stranger in a strange land in…

For ages, the country today known as South Africa was no more than a loose band of separate communities. The Nguni tribes, which settled on the Southern tip of Africa around the 10th century, neither considered themselves a single nation, nor did they consider the Khoisan people already inhibiting the area part of their collective….

In the dying days of the old National Party regime, when I was still working at the old Africana Museum (now Museum Africa), I was given a first-hand taste of the corruption that was by then running rampant at all levels of government. It was just before the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain and…

One of the most frightening episodes of my entire life was the time when, years ago, as a young man, I got sucked into a bizarre fanatical religious cult. No, I’m not talking about the Dutch Reformed Church. Neither am I referring to Facebook. Neither of these organisations were quite as demented as the particular…

“No rubbernecking,” I was told by an official when I crossed into Zimbabwe from Botswana in the late 1990s. I immediately understood that as a journalist I am allowed entry as long as I don’t “snoop around”. Zanu-PF’s resistance to being held accountable, also by “outsiders”, had already by that early stage infiltrated the lower…